McCain is right. The economy is fundamentally sound. You just have to be in the right spot and right now, farming is in and white collar is out.
What is happening is that rising commodities prices, due to economic growth, have forced a realignment towards commodities spending over value added services and manufacturing. What Friedman missed, when he wrote that the earth is flat, is that, you still need valuable land to farm and to mine and to drill, and those people are now the scarce thing, whereas before, they overproduced and the rest of us sort went our merry ways right up until the time they were so many of the rest of us, they cannot produce enough. By contrast, bankers can be made anywhere, and there's quite honestly too many of them.
A quick look at the world markets bears this out. Oil is down, for sure, but it's still higher than it was a few years ago and the only reason it is down is because the world is anticipating a global recession. Surely OPEC will cut production to match, and when it does, everyone in Texas, Louisiana and Alaska will benefit quite handsomely. Similarly, all of the precious metals are quite high, as are the prices of all the basics foods.
If you want to do well in this economy, forget the MBA and Wall Street, and go for Agriculture and start a farm instead. The balance of power in the USA has shifted from Blue State (traditional services and manufacturing) to Red State (traditional agrarian and new lean manufacturing).
The interesting thing is that Obama's proposed fix for all of this, is that, even though he claims to want to help city people and people in the blue states (traditional democrats), he's actually handing Red states a giant feast. He is going to try and cut the consumption of commodities through mandated efficiencies, meaning that Americans are ultimately going to have less, but the rest of the world is still going to consume even more than Americans can conserve. None of his plans are going to bring down the prices of commodities, but they will loosen the leverage blue states have over red even further as they seek out new markets for the commodities they produce.
This guy has done so much for physics, that at some point, he deserves it just from such an enormous body of work. He inspires Hawking, does all sorts of work with theories of everything, he then writes it all up in a simple book that explains how everything works without skimping too much on the math, what more do you need a man to do?
If you did, and you do this, you will be a shamed man. Not to us. To yourself. You'll probably end up using cognitive dissonance to transform yourself into a more callous and selfish individual to escape the dichotomy.
How bad do you need the money? What are you prepared to do to yourself to get it?
I mean, seriously, it's not like I can wire slashdot karma to the bank, or buy gasoline with it, now, can I? If you've got a family to look after, then, making a bunch of free stuff takes on a whole different meaning. I mean, can you tell a wife who is hungry and a child without clothes that, well, you are "making the world a better place". That's ridiculous. You should not be writing software for free, in the hopes that some magic will pay your bills for you.
The bread and butter of the Windows desktop is the SDK and Microsoft is letting it languish at a time when Linux is working to make inroads. Windows SDK has a lot of faults but it has a model for device independence, and has a lot of good functions with which one could theoretically build a good native code framework around in C++...
but... Microsoft's basically giving C++ the back door treatment at the same time C++ has really become the technology it was supposed to be. There's been a lot of C++ stuff that historically was hard to get acceptance on largely because either the compiler or the STL was buggy and within the last few years, both have just clicked into place. I've long preached that C# and "business languages" are better but as I get more and more into STL, I'm just shocked at how elegant this framework can be. STL isn't perfect but C++0x is going to fix some things so that it can be much, much better.
But sadly (or fortunately for Linux), Microsoft is becoming the GM of software, where internal consistency is more valued than creating any strength of any product. We find that everything is being built to leverage or create an artificial economy around Windows now and the proposition isn't there, just as artificial distinctions between Chevy and Pontiac don't make sense any more either. In fact, its so bad, that, Windows Vista is basically torched because the SDK doesn't have that much more to offer. You would want to upgrade the OS often in Windows to get a bunch more USER controls and GDI features, but instead, the path forward is to abandon everything that made Windows so predominant, and instead drive everyone towards.NET.... why force this migration? why throw away all of that Windows SDK skillsets?
It's like, just from a basic marketing perspective, there's Windows saying that we're throwing away everything you did, and along comes Linux, screaming, "for the love of God we have not one but several C++ frameworks for programming it".
Yes he did, he lost his freedom. The other guy tried to derail his project. The grant of an open source license does not mean that that is the only license that you grant. You can have multiple licenses out there.
A decision in favor for those that work for the common good against a single person's greed!
Not at all. The open source author's assertion of copyright is a form of greed as well. The case here is not one of greed, but of theft. The open source author's property was -stolen- by the other guy.
Gallium, iridium, arsenic... good god, I can just see the marchers gathered at the site for the proposed solar cell factory... "ARSENIC KILLS BABIES..." You won't see a single plant built in any US city limit, won't see it the suburbs in the Northeastern USA... about the only places you could build them are in out of the way places in the south.
I'm catholic, and there are plenty catholics who are creationist/ID. Every religion has some goofy belief. Even non-god religions like liberal Environmentalism have a goofy sort of belief that mankind can make a peace with nature. Like, the earth is a fricking rock.
Let's see, I think those companies lost that much in their shareholder value in probably 1.2 seconds of trading today. Geez, maybe if the Feds invested 700 billion into energy production and effeciency, it would do more for the markets than just pouring it into banks.
For that matter, it almost NEVER advocated taking the Bible literally.
True, but I was just dumbing things down for the masses as religion in the USA is identified more with protestant fundamentalism than judeo-catholicism.
What I get a sense of is that most scientists are pushing for preservation and conservation, in part because this is the long term preservation of humanity in the balance as well.
Only because it seems like space flight is so far off for commercial use. If it were cheap to go and get gold from an asteroid, why would you even bother with mining it on earth.
The earth is poor and space is rich. Conservation is something poor people do and doing more with less is a symptom of a slowly declining planetary economy. Peak pricing effects will push some societies out into space looking for more stuff. So will the thirst for freedom on a planet that is becoming more totalitarian because of it.
Hardly. Today's scientists know that our observation horizon and the fraction of time we've been observing the universe is so miniscule it's incredibly unlikely we'd have observed alien life even if the universe were absolutely teeming with it.
First off, I think the mainstream opinion of the scientific community is that there is no life in outer space because it has not been found. Saying that there is is almost a religious opinion, not anything based on facts that we know.
By about now, radio signals from earth have traveled out, what 50 to 100 light years, and there's dozens of star systems in that radius. If anyone is close by, and listening, then, they should have heard us by now.
If they are more advanced than they are, and so inclined, they could have replied on the same frequencies and protocols that they detected. I'd say that, if there's no detection of a signal from another world within the next 50 years or so, its a pretty safe bet that there is no one out there to reply.
True but incomplete. Society rewards people who take big risks and succeed. Those that take risks and don't succeed get a Darwin-award or a bankruptcy.
This is a drastic change in lifestyle, and from it there follows class and caste and specialisation and work. And also philosophy and education and writing.
Actually, there's the point of view that humans without writing aren't really human. You can see this in arguments about slavery during the 17th century - african civilizations did not have any real writing or permanent historical record and that was used to argue they were inferior. Of course, when abolitionists of the day began educating blacks to read and write, this argument fell apart and that actually spurred a more modern and inclusive definition of humanity. We've gone from arguing that you had to have calculus, steel making and navigation to be human, to, well, you just have to be born and some would say a fertilized egg.
I think the thing is that men are wired to be bigger risk takers and society rewards people who take big risks. Of course, with men, for every guy that hits it big, there's a dozen, if not a hundred, that completely flounder.
Looks like ancient shamans used a DWORD in the Good book to represent the age of the earth. When it was downloaded, the figure of 4.3 billion years overflowed and wrapped around to around 6000 years.
Problem solved.
It's funny though, because, you know, as much as everyone deservedly knocks the 6000 year old figure, few actually probe the ancient conceit that drove it - that is, the universe could not exist without mankind, and so, it more or less exists to serve mankind, and therefor we can spread out across the world and conquer it.
Now, with all of our fancy science of course, we know much better. We know that the universe is billions of years old, and that, we've not actually found a shred of life within it that is not from our planet. Not a peep out of SETI, a hello from another world - not even a cell on Mars- nothing. So, it really looks like, that, we can spread across the world and conquer it.
So, the upshot is that ancient man and today's scientists drew exactly the same conclusion. If we can see it, we can take it. All of this mumbo jumbo about the age of the thing doesn't matter a bit. In the mind of the Pope and Goddard alike, its -ours-.
Cut the military budget in half. Arrogant white trash who like their country being the 'world police' will get over it eventually.
We should cut the military budget. This will make it easier for red states to resist Chairman Obama's socialist mandates. He can't really have a socialist state without a big army to keep pieces of it from breaking away, can he?
Far from peak oil alone, we now see peak nearly every commodity on the planet. For the first time in perhaps a century, those who produce the raw materials are now firmly in the driver seat of the economy. In the USA, it means that the wheat belt is now politically more important than the lawyer belt. Sure, the banking sector is going down the drain and Washington is trying to salvage it, but ultimately, those who produce the grain and the gold are doing quite well right now.
Obama's plan of trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle through conservation isn't going to work unless he either plans on killng alot of people or starting a global depression.
For every gallon of gas or bushel of wheat that Americans consume less, there are plenty of Chinese and Indians to use that gas and eat that wheat. There's never going to be a time in the forseable future where urban centers will again hold sway. There's so many people out there, capable of manufacturing, that those who own the food and the raw materials can choose who gets them and at what price.
This whole idea of digital content being worth a lot has just gone down the tubes with New York. If you want real wealth, forget about software. Start a farm or buy shares in a mine.
Of course, the right wing retort to this strawman assault would be to say
"Your body, you pay."
If you want to have the right to choose, then you ought to pay for your own medical care.
If it is your body, then you are reasonably responsible for your own sexual education and you don't need our tax money to pay for you to learn how to screw.
If you want the public to pay for your well being, then you are by definition a pet of the people at large, and conservatives have as much a right to your body at that point as you do.
Do remember that George Bush has done what he did by essentially using powers the left wing granted to itself in government for right wing ends. If you put the government in charge of health care, just imagine a future Bush deciding what the government should in fact pay for.
Slashdot Mirror
McCain is right. The economy is fundamentally sound. You just have to be in the right spot and right now, farming is in and white collar is out.
What is happening is that rising commodities prices, due to economic growth, have forced a realignment towards commodities spending over value added services and manufacturing. What Friedman missed, when he wrote that the earth is flat, is that, you still need valuable land to farm and to mine and to drill, and those people are now the scarce thing, whereas before, they overproduced and the rest of us sort went our merry ways right up until the time they were so many of the rest of us, they cannot produce enough. By contrast, bankers can be made anywhere, and there's quite honestly too many of them.
A quick look at the world markets bears this out. Oil is down, for sure, but it's still higher than it was a few years ago and the only reason it is down is because the world is anticipating a global recession. Surely OPEC will cut production to match, and when it does, everyone in Texas, Louisiana and Alaska will benefit quite handsomely. Similarly, all of the precious metals are quite high, as are the prices of all the basics foods.
If you want to do well in this economy, forget the MBA and Wall Street, and go for Agriculture and start a farm instead. The balance of power in the USA has shifted from Blue State (traditional services and manufacturing) to Red State (traditional agrarian and new lean manufacturing).
The interesting thing is that Obama's proposed fix for all of this, is that, even though he claims to want to help city people and people in the blue states (traditional democrats), he's actually handing Red states a giant feast. He is going to try and cut the consumption of commodities through mandated efficiencies, meaning that Americans are ultimately going to have less, but the rest of the world is still going to consume even more than Americans can conserve. None of his plans are going to bring down the prices of commodities, but they will loosen the leverage blue states have over red even further as they seek out new markets for the commodities they produce.
This guy has done so much for physics, that at some point, he deserves it just from such an enormous body of work. He inspires Hawking, does all sorts of work with theories of everything, he then writes it all up in a simple book that explains how everything works without skimping too much on the math, what more do you need a man to do?
If you did, and you do this, you will be a shamed man. Not to us. To yourself. You'll probably end up using cognitive dissonance to transform yourself into a more callous and selfish individual to escape the dichotomy.
How bad do you need the money? What are you prepared to do to yourself to get it?
I mean, seriously, it's not like I can wire slashdot karma to the bank, or buy gasoline with it, now, can I? If you've got a family to look after, then, making a bunch of free stuff takes on a whole different meaning. I mean, can you tell a wife who is hungry and a child without clothes that, well, you are "making the world a better place". That's ridiculous. You should not be writing software for free, in the hopes that some magic will pay your bills for you.
I like how you were able to get a car analogy in there. :-)
Next time, I'll not only include cars, but I'll also see how many times I can say "Main Street" and "Joe Six Pack"
The bread and butter of the Windows desktop is the SDK and Microsoft is letting it languish at a time when Linux is working to make inroads. Windows SDK has a lot of faults but it has a model for device independence, and has a lot of good functions with which one could theoretically build a good native code framework around in C++...
but... Microsoft's basically giving C++ the back door treatment at the same time C++ has really become the technology it was supposed to be. There's been a lot of C++ stuff that historically was hard to get acceptance on largely because either the compiler or the STL was buggy and within the last few years, both have just clicked into place. I've long preached that C# and "business languages" are better but as I get more and more into STL, I'm just shocked at how elegant this framework can be. STL isn't perfect but C++0x is going to fix some things so that it can be much, much better.
But sadly (or fortunately for Linux), Microsoft is becoming the GM of software, where internal consistency is more valued than creating any strength of any product. We find that everything is being built to leverage or create an artificial economy around Windows now and the proposition isn't there, just as artificial distinctions between Chevy and Pontiac don't make sense any more either. In fact, its so bad, that, Windows Vista is basically torched because the SDK doesn't have that much more to offer. You would want to upgrade the OS often in Windows to get a bunch more USER controls and GDI features, but instead, the path forward is to abandon everything that made Windows so predominant, and instead drive everyone towards .NET.... why force this migration? why throw away all of that Windows SDK skillsets?
It's like, just from a basic marketing perspective, there's Windows saying that we're throwing away everything you did, and along comes Linux, screaming, "for the love of God we have not one but several C++ frameworks for programming it".
You have to ask, what did they take away.
But he didn't -lose- anything
Yes he did, he lost his freedom. The other guy tried to derail his project. The grant of an open source license does not mean that that is the only license that you grant. You can have multiple licenses out there.
It's pure theft, this case, pure and simple.
A decision in favor for those that work for the common good against a single person's greed!
Not at all. The open source author's assertion of copyright is a form of greed as well. The case here is not one of greed, but of theft. The open source author's property was -stolen- by the other guy.
The article says that the 40% rating was achieved while being illuminated with the equivalent of 400 suns.
Gallium, iridium, arsenic... good god, I can just see the marchers gathered at the site for the proposed solar cell factory... "ARSENIC KILLS BABIES..." You won't see a single plant built in any US city limit, won't see it the suburbs in the Northeastern USA... about the only places you could build them are in out of the way places in the south.
I'm catholic, and there are plenty catholics who are creationist/ID. Every religion has some goofy belief. Even non-god religions like liberal Environmentalism have a goofy sort of belief that mankind can make a peace with nature. Like, the earth is a fricking rock.
Let's see, I think those companies lost that much in their shareholder value in probably 1.2 seconds of trading today. Geez, maybe if the Feds invested 700 billion into energy production and effeciency, it would do more for the markets than just pouring it into banks.
For that matter, it almost NEVER advocated taking the Bible literally.
True, but I was just dumbing things down for the masses as religion in the USA is identified more with protestant fundamentalism than judeo-catholicism.
What I get a sense of is that most scientists are pushing for preservation and conservation, in part because this is the long term preservation of humanity in the balance as well.
Only because it seems like space flight is so far off for commercial use. If it were cheap to go and get gold from an asteroid, why would you even bother with mining it on earth.
The earth is poor and space is rich. Conservation is something poor people do and doing more with less is a symptom of a slowly declining planetary economy. Peak pricing effects will push some societies out into space looking for more stuff. So will the thirst for freedom on a planet that is becoming more totalitarian because of it.
Hardly. Today's scientists know that our observation horizon and the fraction of time we've been observing the universe is so miniscule it's incredibly unlikely we'd have observed alien life even if the universe were absolutely teeming with it.
First off, I think the mainstream opinion of the scientific community is that there is no life in outer space because it has not been found. Saying that there is is almost a religious opinion, not anything based on facts that we know.
By about now, radio signals from earth have traveled out, what 50 to 100 light years, and there's dozens of star systems in that radius. If anyone is close by, and listening, then, they should have heard us by now.
If they are more advanced than they are, and so inclined, they could have replied on the same frequencies and protocols that they detected. I'd say that, if there's no detection of a signal from another world within the next 50 years or so, its a pretty safe bet that there is no one out there to reply.
We're filing them all. Trust us. It will work ok. You just keep writing that stuff openly and let our lawyers take care of the paperwork...
True but incomplete. Society rewards people who take big risks and succeed. Those that take risks and don't succeed get a Darwin-award or a bankruptcy.
Unless you own a bank! :-)
This is a drastic change in lifestyle, and from it there follows class and caste and specialisation and work. And also philosophy and education and writing.
Actually, there's the point of view that humans without writing aren't really human. You can see this in arguments about slavery during the 17th century - african civilizations did not have any real writing or permanent historical record and that was used to argue they were inferior. Of course, when abolitionists of the day began educating blacks to read and write, this argument fell apart and that actually spurred a more modern and inclusive definition of humanity. We've gone from arguing that you had to have calculus, steel making and navigation to be human, to, well, you just have to be born and some would say a fertilized egg.
I think the thing is that men are wired to be bigger risk takers and society rewards people who take big risks. Of course, with men, for every guy that hits it big, there's a dozen, if not a hundred, that completely flounder.
Looks like ancient shamans used a DWORD in the Good book to represent the age of the earth. When it was downloaded, the figure of 4.3 billion years overflowed and wrapped around to around 6000 years.
Problem solved.
It's funny though, because, you know, as much as everyone deservedly knocks the 6000 year old figure, few actually probe the ancient conceit that drove it - that is, the universe could not exist without mankind, and so, it more or less exists to serve mankind, and therefor we can spread out across the world and conquer it.
Now, with all of our fancy science of course, we know much better. We know that the universe is billions of years old, and that, we've not actually found a shred of life within it that is not from our planet. Not a peep out of SETI, a hello from another world - not even a cell on Mars- nothing. So, it really looks like, that, we can spread across the world and conquer it.
So, the upshot is that ancient man and today's scientists drew exactly the same conclusion. If we can see it, we can take it. All of this mumbo jumbo about the age of the thing doesn't matter a bit. In the mind of the Pope and Goddard alike, its -ours-.
I figure that, once I get my cold fusion bomb working, Space X and I will team forces to RULE THE WORLD!
Cut the military budget in half. Arrogant white trash who like their country being the 'world police' will get over it eventually.
We should cut the military budget. This will make it easier for red states to resist Chairman Obama's socialist mandates. He can't really have a socialist state without a big army to keep pieces of it from breaking away, can he?
Far from peak oil alone, we now see peak nearly every commodity on the planet. For the first time in perhaps a century, those who produce the raw materials are now firmly in the driver seat of the economy. In the USA, it means that the wheat belt is now politically more important than the lawyer belt. Sure, the banking sector is going down the drain and Washington is trying to salvage it, but ultimately, those who produce the grain and the gold are doing quite well right now.
Obama's plan of trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle through conservation isn't going to work unless he either plans on killng alot of people or starting a global depression.
For every gallon of gas or bushel of wheat that Americans consume less, there are plenty of Chinese and Indians to use that gas and eat that wheat. There's never going to be a time in the forseable future where urban centers will again hold sway. There's so many people out there, capable of manufacturing, that those who own the food and the raw materials can choose who gets them and at what price.
This whole idea of digital content being worth a lot has just gone down the tubes with New York. If you want real wealth, forget about software. Start a farm or buy shares in a mine.
The person being killed probably doesn't care much whether he's injected with a lethal poison or shot in the head
It's not like we could ask Jack Kennedy what he thought in the moments where his heart was still beating as they hauled him off to Parkland.
Of course, the right wing retort to this strawman assault would be to say
"Your body, you pay."
If you want to have the right to choose, then you ought to pay for your own medical care.
If it is your body, then you are reasonably responsible for your own sexual education and you don't need our tax money to pay for you to learn how to screw.
If you want the public to pay for your well being, then you are by definition a pet of the people at large, and conservatives have as much a right to your body at that point as you do.
Do remember that George Bush has done what he did by essentially using powers the left wing granted to itself in government for right wing ends. If you put the government in charge of health care, just imagine a future Bush deciding what the government should in fact pay for.